Selenium IDE Scheduler Has Arrived – Part 5

In part 4, you learnt more about setting schedules using two advanced ways, viz., using the natural language processor and using cron-like expressions. In this part, I am going to walk you through the rest of the functionality in the Scheduler dialog box.

Open the scheduler dialog box. This time we are going add a second job. To add a new job click on the Add button, i.e. the button with the + sign.

Once you click on the Add button, you will be shown the New Job tab where you can set the details of the new job.

You can set the details of the new job in exactly the same way as you in part 2.

So far, I have always been using a test suite in a job. You can also select a single test case that you want to run or even leave the suite text box blank. A job with the blank test suite will simply run the currently open test suite, what ever it may be. I cannot think of a reason why you would want to do that, but it was very useful to me while I was developing the scheduler.

There is no need to save your changes as you add and edit jobs. Your changes are saved automatically when you click the OK button to close the Scheduler dialog box. You can click on the Cancel button to cancel all your changes. It is important to note that the Scheduler dialog box is not able to undo and redo your changes one at a time. It follows the all or nothing model. If you make a change that you did not want, like delete a job, you can click the Cancel button to discard all your changes and start all over again.

To delete the current job, click on the Delete button, i.e. the button with the – sign.

Clicking on the Delete button simply deletes the current job. No questions asked. If you “oops!” then you need to hit the Cancel button and start all over.

To select a particular job to edit or delete you need to go to the Jobs tab.

The Jobs tab, simply shows a list of all the jobs you have created by their titles. Once you click on a job, it is available for editing using the Edit Job tab. Once a job is selected, you can also delete it using the Delete button.

That brings to the final tab in the Scheduler dialog box, the Activity tab.

The Activity tab shows messages from the scheduler. It contains useful information about what the scheduler is doing behind the scenes. If you are sometimes having an issue with the scheduler, the Activity tab would help to get an idea of what is going on.

There is one final item that I want to talk about before I close this part. This is the Run Now feature. You have probably noticed it already. It is available on the Edit Job tab and the New Job tab as a check box called Run Now.

If you check the Run Now check box for a job, it will be played immediately upon exiting the Scheduler dialog box. If the Run Now check box is unchecked, the job will be played at the scheduled time. That is the simple part. It also keeps track of the scheduled times of jobs and automatically triggers them when the time is due and they were not run. This happens if you exit the Selenium IDE while there were scheduled job or if you are editing the job in the Scheduler dialog box and the scheduled time of the job passes. Or rather, it is supposed to do something like that. So if the scheduler asks you if want to play the jobs scheduled in the past, you have an idea about what happened. I feel that there are still some bugs lurking in this feature.

In this part you saw more of the Scheduler dialog box including how to add more jobs, edit jobs and delete jobs along with the Activity log and the Run Now feature. In part 6, I am going to ramble on some more about other features and plans for the future.